Successful Practices and Lessons Learned in Implementing Policy #188

The following panel presentations featured Policy #188 coordinators and disability service providers sharing their own successful practices as well as discussing questions posed by the group.

Amy Rovner and Derek Levy, Shoreline Community College

Our top lessons fall into these four categories: cross-campus collaboration, top-level buy-in, collaboration with peers, and the three P’s: Prioritization, Perserverance, and Patience.

Cross Campus Collaboration: Since accessibility impacts all of campus operations (students, faculty, staff, and the public), we collaborate across multiple departments.

Top level Buy-In: Make your case and align with the current strategic plan. Know what the audience wants to hear and how to incentivize accessibility across campus. Also look at the risks of not being accessible. Where can money come from for these endeavors., and create a very spelled out budget for where each cost goes. Create an Accessible IT Policy.

Collaborate with Peers: Instead of reinventing the wheel, share promising practices. Utilize SBCTC assisting, like captioning subsidies, Ally for Canvas, and various online trainings and webinars.

The three P’s: Prioritization, Perserverance, Patience

• Prioritize what is most important--usually start with risk mitigation (widely used and public facing content), low hanging fruit, and policy and procedures.
• Perservere and continue addressing accessibility issues--often we need to repeatedly explain, demonstrate, and send the message for accessibility.
• Have Patience and realize changing campus culture takes a long time. Recruit allies across campus and apply equity and social justice messages in different ways across campus.

Kimberly Lothyan and Craig Kerr, Edmonds Community College

We created an e-content committee in 2015, which has widespread participation across campus. The eContent committee have all been working together to make sure all online materials are accessible. A sub-committee of the eContent committee have specifically been following the remediation efforts outlined in the University of Montana Office of Civil Rights resolution. The e-content committee was able to create a timeline to tackle each issue and continue addressing issues as they come up. We then went across campus and made sure we had feedback, awareness, and buy-in from all departments related to each issue, as well as starting training and resources on each specific issue.

Monica Olsson, Tacoma Community College

I have five lessons I have learned in my time as a coordinator for accessibility and since the creation of Policy #188.

• Identify your team: Institute a Policy #188 Coordinator outside of the disability office so there can be across campus collaboration. Accessibility is a campus-wide responsibility. Create a team across IT, e-learning, disability resources, and other various task forces, and make their names known to each other and across campus.
• Everything will take longer than you think: Create a plan but be willing to be flexible. These types of collaboration require a growth of trust and building a team. Celebrate whatever levels of progress are possible.
• Acknowledge the fear of messing up: Often people don’t want to participate because they don’t have knowledge about IT or accessibility. Tell everyone it’s okay to not know and provide a lot of opportunity to learn. When faculty pushback based on time, materials, or workload, realize they are afraid of taking on too much or messing up.
• Set the tone: Pay attention to how you talk about this work and how you get others excited. Don’t focus on how hard it can be, but the progress that can be gained by trying. It’s okay to be real, express your own struggles, and find a solution together.
• Include your students: invite student representatives to serve on your campus accessibility committee, host a student panel, and allow students to test documents using their screen readers so you can collect feedback.

Ward Naf, Whatcom Community College, and Jess Thompson, Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC)

The Committee for Accessible Technology Oversight (CATO) is helping to create the Accessibility Compliance Tracker (ACT), based on a program Whatcom Community College created to keep track of software all faculty and staff are using and track data on what materials and resources are being used. This way, we can create an inventory via each department on what software and materials need to be kept accessible. We discovered that we have 918 pieces of software being used across campus. In the admin view, we can list what has been assessed and is accessible, which have Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs), as well as WCAG 2.0 and Policy #188 requirements for each software.

We may be able to share this tool statewide to track software collaboratively across all institutions. We can set up different levels of permissions as well as find the most commonly used software. We can score software based on accessibility and share that information statewide. We are just in the beginning steps of financing CATO, investigating third party testers, and finding a trusted tester platform.

Panel One Discussion

How will CATO handle third party users and possible copyright violations with software in the ACT?

ADA law overrules copyright law. Furthermore, the programs themselves will not be downloadable from the tracker, just evaluated and rated.

What are some methods for keeping websites accessible?

There are some plug-ins for tracking accessibility. Siteimprove, used at the UW, is one example of a web accessibility tool; it also checks for dead links and misspelled words.

For the ACT, currently, if faculty and staff don’t submit their software, do they get punished or get to not use a software?

There is no punishment, we just ask them repeatedly and explain why we want them to submit their software. We’ve gotten 918 software submissions, which is no small number.

When will the ACT be live across the state?

Hopefully by this summer--everyone could start using the current version, as it will all be transferable to the new version by this summer.

For the training that you did where you had people learning document accessibility, did you have a training document or did people bring their own documents?

I provided a training document to show them each aspect of making a document accessible. I put them in teams to also be able to work together to figure it out. Each person on a team became an expert on a piece of accessibility, and they learned they could all do it. We also provided resources to then take back to their own documents.

How does procurement know about how to get accessible software?

Procurement staff should converse with IT. We can make this process more streamlined by connecting all of these departments and ensuring a process is put in place to make sure accessible software is purchased. We can usually get a lower price when more institutions are involved; for example, we included IT and procurement across  Washington State schools for captioning, so we could create a request for proposal (RFP) to get a lower price from a captioning company.

What is the cost of evaluators for something like ACT?

We don’t really have a cost yet--we just started trying to find someone who will take on accessibility of desktop applications and software.

Patrick Pow, University of Washington Tacoma

At University of Washington Tacoma, I first met with the Chancellor’s Cabinet, the Campus Technology Committee, and the Faculty Executive Council to obtain their buy-in to WA Policy #188. We are using the UW Tri-campus IT Accessibility Policy with an implementation schedule to meet the State deadlines. Having been endorsed by the above stakeholders, I visited and explained Policy #188 to all the deans and academic directors with their top administrators, librarians, and the heads of various administration departments. I always bring with me materials and resources (such as the “Diversity includes Disability” stickers) to promote accessibility when meeting with groups on campus. I include accessibility in many different conversations and remind faculty and staff employees that all content must be accessible for all WA State employees and the public.

Using Siteimprove to make sure our campus web site is accessible, we have also provided closed-captioning for all the public facing video materials.

It is important to work with faculty and not just push resources at them. We’ve made sure training program is available to help them create and promote their own accessible resources, and we are working on creating more options for faculty to reach towards and engage with.  When I receive push back from some faculty, I have to reason with them that ADA trumps copyright law as well as convert for them accessible materials as needed.

We have also been able to lean on accessibility specialists from UW Seattle who can come down and support our faculty and staff.

Bridget Irish, The Evergreen State College

I have added an accessibility template into the faculty resources and Canvas template, which some faculty try to ignore but I often have to bring it up and promote it. I also created a module of accessibility how-to guides that can be added to the faculty website. I believe all faculty should have the base knowledge of how to make accessible resources and curriculum. By utilizing Canvas and showing how to make those templates and tools accessible, faculty will be more prepared to share knowledge accessibly from the beginning.

Carly Gerard, Western Washington University

Our school has completed four major actions towards a more accessible campus:

• We created an accessibility notice. This includes getting buy-in from across campus and is linked to from every page on our school website.
• We hired two dedicated accessibility staff. This included a digital technology accessibility coordinator and web accessibility developer. This allows us to give more time and attention to staff and faculty, as well as audit more materials to make sure all websites, videos, and documents are accessible.
• We created WWU-based accessibility training for web developers and content creators. We have created a crash course that allows people to finish the training in one day rather than a week.
• We started going through auditing and remediation of public facing websites. We use Wave, Siteimprove, and Deque Axe to help automate testing, as well as manual searching. We aim to fix 100% of errors by July of 2019.

Gaby de Jongh, University of Washington, Seattle

At UW, we can divide and conquer by breaking up aspects of technology accessibility between different specialists. I focus on document accessibility, while other specialists focus on other aspects of accessible technology. Our main responsibility is to reach out to different units and departments, faculty, and staff and informing all content creators of their responsibility to make materials accessible. This creates a big, cultural change which can often create push back and takes patience.

To be successful, we work with Disability Resources for Students (DRS) and reach out to instructors to be proactive to create accessible classroom materials. Also, identifying advocates within each department makes it is easier to promote document accessibility campus wide, and helps with ensuring accessible outward facing material. We also have to understand the workflow of document creators and how they are using the tools they have, show them how they can make materials accessible using these tools.

Be aware of the approach you bring--instead of being authoritarian, show how someone can use what they already know to make content accessible. Often, materials can easily be made accessible if they are using Microsoft tools. Starting with low hanging fruit and having resources ready to offer makes the process more manageable.

Panel Two Discussion

Related to the Canvas accessibility checklist and how-to guides for faculty, all staff and faculty involved with Canvas should be required to take a training. This training should also happen for those using Drupal to create websites as well.

SensusAccess is a free PDF conversion tool for individuals without school email addresses; however, for mass use for institutions, they must have a contract (UW has a contract). It is a 24/7 online automated service, and while it doesn’t create perfect accessible document, it creates a usable document until DRS or a faculty member can create a better accessible document. Ally also has an automated conversion tool.

Canvas 101 course is available online.

Create open-source resources, so they can be shared and used by all. You can learn more about getting an open source license.